Damien & The Love Guru

Just after the copyright, in the first pages of a book, comes the dedication. It is a space for the author to address gratitude or affection, however openly or cryptically, to someone important in the writing of the book. Such text space offers little guidance to a reader, but it orients a writer. It verifies the author as someone real, a participant in the world via networks of friendship, partnership, and indebtedness. How else to be real than through -ship or through debt? The more enigmatic the details of the dedication — initials, a first name, a nickname — the more we may surmise about the intimacy between writer and dedicatee. Intimacy is so measured on a scale of the cryptic.

A dedication is part of a book’s front matter, meaning that even though it is within the book’s soft/hard covers, it is not really part of the book itself. In the genre of the dedication, there are frequent petitions for likeness to the architecture of the vestibule or the portico. In the same way that a portico is an ancillary to a house, a dedication stands in front of a text. It is a threshold space that can be easily passed over. Neither properly inside nor properly outside. Neither properly private nor properly public. In this metaphor, the reader gets cast in the role of the visitor who, before entering the text proper, may take a moment to yield or to pause.

Interestingly, in early dedications from the first age of print, this metaphor is in reverse. The book is a visitor at the doors of its potential reader, begging to be let in, to be given shelter, a warm space to rest. Early modern authors almost never met the individuals to whom their books were dedicated. That the production of books was so costly in earlier centuries, meant that each book needed to lodge direct appeal to its individual patrons/readers in such a form. As the economics of book production have shifted, the role of the dedication page has moved from a private address of asking patronage, to a more public declaration of indebtedness.

What the convention of the dedication offers to us is a format for speaking privately and publicly at once. It acts as a reminder that the form of a text or a work changes depending on who it is addressed to. When offering up anything for reception, one is often labouring under a latent but insistent demand to speak to everyone equally, to pitch one’s address at the fiction of some general viewer. But the dedication page speaks publicly in a private language. It mirrors the strange charge of reading a confidential letter or hearing a love song written for somebody else.

The dedication sets out a one-directional contract between the writer and their dedicatee. As readers we cannot meet the terms of that arrangement, but we can serve as witness, to triangulate the intimacy of address via a third position. So what do we, as readers, do from this threshold; looking onto a private language that seems at once to invite our attention and to turn its back?